March 15 - 17, 2019

Team Culture: Katacoda, a Learning Medium

Sunday - Mar 17 4:00 PM
- WINCHESTER

Jonathan Johnson

Software Architect

We are continuously learning and keeping up with the changing landscapes and ecosystems in software engineering. Some technologies are difficult to learn or may take too much time for us to set up just to get to the key points of each technology. One of the reasons why you might be here at NFJS is to do exactly that – too learn. Great!

There are many mediums we use to learn and we often combine them for different perspectives. Books, how-to articles, GitHub readmes, blog entries, recorded talks on YouTube, and online courses. All these help us sort through the new concepts. I'm sure you have your favorites.

Here we explore another learning medium to add to your toolbox: Katacoda

Katacoda is becoming a compelling platform for learning concepts. While the online content is growing, you can also author your own topics for your public community or private teams. As a teacher, trainer, presenter or mentor this medium can help you deliver your training to very larger audiences. Katacoda offers a platform that hosts live server command lines in your browser with a split screen for course material broken into easy to follow steps.

This is a 90 minute mini-workshop where you learn to be an author on Katacoda. Bring your favorite laptop with just a browser and a text editor to:

Understand the how this platform works

Review a few example scenarios

Create an account and publish our own course of scenarios.

Have a Github account and bring your laptop. Let's learn together.

Video Preview

About Jonathan Johnson

Jonathan Johnson is a platform architect at Intelligent Artifacts, formulating the symbiosis of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) platform with the Kubernetes ecosystem, and a software architect at Dijure LLC.

Jonathan is halfway into his second score of engineering commercial software, driven by his desire to design helpful software to move us forward. His applications began with laboratory instrument software and managing its data. Jonathan was enticed by the advent of object-oriented design to develop personal banking software. Banking soon turned to the internet, and enterprise applications took off. Java exploded onto the scene, and since then he has inhabited that ecosystem. At 454 Life Sciences and Roche Diagnostics, Jonathan returned to laboratory software and leveraged Java-based state machines and enterprise services to manage the terabytes of data flowing out of DNA sequencing instruments. Then as a hands-on architect at Thermo Fisher Scientific, he applied the advantages of microservices, containers, and Kubernetes to their laboratory management platform.

Jonathan enjoys comparing and sharing his adventures with peers. He shares ways to modernize application architectures while adhering to the fundamentals of high modularity and low coupling. A longtime resident of Connecticut, he discusses his experiences with technical groups and meetups.